Virgin are fast this morning!

Xbigman

I'm with VM and still have a 20Mb modem which is plenty for me. Supposedly EE 4G speeds in my area are up around 18Mb. Maybe I need to seriously look at whether or not I need VM. A 6Gb sim costs £16 and I think would last me more than a month. I really must get around to trying this out.
As an additional advantage I could set Windows 10 to metered and stop the automatic downloads, which I can't if I plug VM into the Ethernet card.

Hmmm....


Darren

littlerock

My Virgin Media broadband cable is very unreliable and seems to be due to contention - too many local users. I would upgrade to the latest high speed but it has just been put back again locally - to early 2017. And we live in outer London!

debitcardmayhem

Where I am you can't get Virgin, but I booked four and twenty virgins from Inverness on national express and they arrived arrived within 24 hours :cool:

Edited: oh I am not the Mayor of Bayswater nor is my wife Eskimo Nell.

poppellerant

kwikbreaks wrote: »

VM used to tackle the problem of a few heavy users by throttling them back if they exceeded set limits but then that got them into trouble with the ASA over their "unlimited" claims and rather than drop those they dropped their traffic management.

Virgin Media still throttle heavy upload users: Thresholds - My Virgin Media

kwikbreaks

poppellerant wrote: »

Virgin Media still throttle heavy upload users: Thresholds - My Virgin Media

Ah so it was only download throttling that they stopped then. The draconian levels of upstream throttling shown suggest they may have got some network protection in place from torrents now then. Given the technology used they certainly need to. I can only assume from the still frequent complaints I see that it's just a case of spending more on marketing than infrastructure to blame now. If I ever mention I'm back on cable keep an eye out for fork tailed skaters with horns.

RumRat

I guess it's good news for customers when someone says they won't use it....The less people on it the more the contention rate drops....;):D
Seriously though, the opinions of anyone is going to be formed by their individual experiences.
Anyone wanting to know if it's good in their area are wasting time on national forums. Find a couple of neighbours who have it and ask how good/bad their experience is.

Oblivion

donnac2558 wrote: »

Now the problem with the OOKLA test is, showing Dublin as my ping point. There is one in Belfast as another speed test said its 3miles from me.

You can select a server of your choice in the Ookla speed test.
I often select one in Australia or some remote place on the map just for the fun of seeing the impact on ping and speeds.

kwikbreaks

RumRat wrote: »

Find a couple of neighbours who have it and ask how good/bad their experience is.

Spot on. Given the way it works the nearer the better. A different street may be on a different optical node. Asking about a town or even a major postcode is not going to tell you anything.

What is national and was the final straw for me is the way the cynically overcharge those who don't call in regularly for rebates. They are always looking for ways to keep you in a minimum term too. For instance new customers will get the newest speeds bands released but existing customers have to wait - often as much as a year - unless of course they phone in when they can get the new speeds immediately but of course at the price of a new minimum term.

RumRat

kwikbreaks wrote: »

Spot on. Given the way it works the nearer the better. A different street may be on a different optical node. Asking about a town or even a major postcode is not going to tell you anything.

What is national and was the final straw for me is the way the cynically overcharge those who don't call in regularly for rebates. They are always looking for ways to keep you in a minimum term too. For instance new customers will get the newest speeds bands released but existing customers have to wait - often as much as a year - unless of course they phone in when they can get the new speeds immediately but of course at the price of a new minimum term.

Yes, although I can't fault the speed and reliability, it is a pain having to phone each time there is a price increase or the 12 month's is up. I've just got into the habit now and treat it like a birthday.
That said, when ever I've phoned there has always been a deal to be made and I'm happy with what I pay for what I get, at the moment.

buglawton

Wow OP, you finally reached an upload speed of a princely 10MB!
I am on 50MB and have an upload of 3MB. Complained about it to Virgin as once in a while, when working from home and doing a rare but large upload via work VPN, it's so slow that I have to beg a colleague who's also working from home to upload the same file for me to the company network via his twisted pair phone line - his upload speed being 15MB.

It turns out that Virgin only offer upload speeds of about 5% of download. So, despite the much touted coax cable to home, they cannot beat a moderate Fibre to the Cabinet connection that ends in a twisted pair!

Virgin quotes some arcane technical reason why they cannot improve this, the meaning of which I think is "it's such a broken basic design that it cannot be improved, you need (to pay for) a faster download and get new router to boot".